Anti-social behaviour

Table of Content

CHAPTER ONE3

INTRODUCTION3

Purpose of this Study3

Research limitations/implications3

Aims of this Paper3

Anti-social behaviour4

CHAPTER TWO9

LITERATURE REVIEW9

CHAPTER THREE12

METHODOLOGY12

REFERENCES14

Chapter One

Introduction

Purpose of this Study

The purpose of this paper is to propose that “social demarketing” campaigns need to recognize unique sub segments of individuals engaging in behaviours having substantial negative societal impacts.

Research limitations/implications

The study is based on two years of a national survey taken in one country and self-reports only. The implications support the propositions of a general theory of extremely frequent consumption behaviour.

The paper provides individual-level analysis of chronic anti-social actors engaging in road-rage related behaviours and compares them to one another as well as non-equivalent comparison groups of actors not engaging in such behaviour; the paper describes the merits of experience frequency segmentation.

Aims of this Paper

The aims of the present paper are modest and ontological. The focus is on proposing and testing a property-space (Lazarsfeld, 1965) method for identifying and describing potential target groups of individuals chronically engaging in anti-social behaviour. The proposal is that such a research approach is useful to take before crafting influence strategies in social demarketing programs. The aims do not include advancing a general theory of social marketing strategies or testing the efficacy of specific social demarketing strategies.

Anti-social behaviour

“Social demarketing” refers to strategies attempting to influence individuals and/or organizations to decrease or stop doing behaviours that harm themselves, others, or the environment. This definition is intentionally broader than the one Engel et al. (1990) propose and Comm (1997, p. 95) adopts; “demarketing refers to a deliberate attempt to induce consumers to buy less in product classes where environmental impacts are most severe.” The proposal for “social demarketing” builds upon but is broader than Kotler and Levy's (1971, p. 75) proposal that demarketing is a strategy that a firm may pursue in some contexts:

[…] we define demarketing as that aspect of marketing that deals with discouraging customers in general or a certain class of customers in particular on either a temporary or permanent basis.

Wall (2007) describes how the term, “demarketing,” has passed from the earlier association with marketers' attempts to reduce consumer purchases/use of conventional products to a particular prevalence in the context of public health and consumption patterns that threaten to have a serious impact on future generations. Intervention programs aiming to decrease road rage behaviour are at the start-up stage in the UK. For example, “In 1998, nine states introduced 26 aggressive driving bills. To date, only two of these have been enacted: Arizona's aggressive driving bill and the Driver's Education Requirement” (Rathbone and Huckabee, 1999, p. 7).

This paper profiles the lives of British who report chronically “giving-the-finger” to other motorists while driving and comparing these motorists to other drivers. This report provides a nation-wide (UK) examination of persons engaging extremely frequently versus infrequently versus never engaging in this anti-social behaviour - such lifestyle activities, interests, opinions, and media-usage information about persons doing such behaviour may be useful for designing effective programs to reduce the occurrence of such behaviour.

The focus here is on taking a group-based view of ...